Welcome to 2015: The Impossible List

Hello? Is anyone out there? It’s 6AM we should all be at the gym sweating our butts off, chugging water, eating a lot of salads, being more productive, becoming organized, setting long-term goals, being better at our jobs, being nicer people, watching less tv, dressing better, taking more showers, going to bed before midnight, cleaning the cheetos that we dropped behind our bed 4 years ago out, writing in our journal what we’re all grateful for EVERY DAY. It’s January 1st people, this is our new lives!

but it isn’t.

This is actually a pretty positive and happy blog post and I just want to remind you all that most of us will probably fail at the resolutions we set up if not now, or next week, or next month, we’re going to screw up and we’ll wait until 2016 rolls around and finally be ready this time. But then we won’t and the cycle will start all over again and we’ll hate ourselves. I feel about the same as all of you, I make resolutions, I feel good and stick to them for about 3 weeks. And for some reason new beginnings just aren’t the same when you begin them May 10th or the Wednesday after 4th of July. There’s something special about a brand new year. But it isn’t so special when you come to the end of the year and realized you fell apart again.

So today I wanted to write about something I found on a blog I’ve been checking out recently. I’m kind of a nerd for college info and just general productivity and success and I recently stumbled on Thomas’ College Info Geek.

There’s a lot of great info about school and studying and everything else and I am most impressed because he’s also in web and graphic design (hey hey), but something on his blog caught my attention and that was his Impossible List which is kind of the opposite of a Bucket List and something that is forever changing. Basically if you take goals you have such as running a 5k, you break those things up into smaller goals like so:

Running a 5K:

Walk 30 minutes 4 times a week

Run for 1 minute every 3 minutes

Run 5/30 minutes

Run 1 mile

Run 1 mile in 15 minutes

etc.

Each time you complete one of your set of goals, move on to the next one that required you to do the first. I’ll lay out my own list comparable to Thomas’:

So, what would be on your impossible list? I really like the concept of this because so many of these things are possible if we actually tackle them and it gives us more of a reason to chase them if we have to do them before we can do another thing. It is like trying to reach a goal by hitting the little goals but to have them laid out is a great motivator. And you can come back and add to it anytime you think of something else you want to do. I’d also recommend laying out a plan on how much each trip would cost to things such as events. That way when you’ve started saving money you can see just how much you’d need.